Wow, what a week! Exciting games, a couple of upsets, a loss by a previously-undefeated team, and some record-setting performances. Let’s get right into it.

Awesome

Dillon Ward

Ward had a rough start to the season, missing a game with an injury and then not playing the way we’re used to seeing him play for the next few, forcing people to speculate that perhaps the injury wasn’t 100% gone. But on Friday night, there was no question that Ward was back. As we like to say, he made all the saves he was expected to make and a few he wasn’t. People always say that lacrosse is a game of runs, and a very important part of that is being able to come up with big saves to kill any momentum your opponent might be gaining. Vancouver scored two goals in a row only once in that game, and those goals were two and a half minutes apart in the third. Ward managed to shut the Warriors offense down enough to prevent any runs from starting, and the Mammoth offense did their job at the other end to keep any momentum swinging Colorado’s way.

The two most-often heard phrases on the broadcast, particularly in the first half, were “Ward makes the save” and “Crowley shoots, misses wide”.

Curt Malawsky

Yes, Vancouver lost on Friday night, and they didn’t play all that well. Technically, that’s Not Awesome but I’m tired of beating that dead horse. The reason this is in the Awesome category is the post-game interview with Warriors head coach and GM Curt Malawsky. He pulls no punches and said that their performance stunk. He feels that they’ve let the fans down, they’ve let the franchise down, and they have to be better from goaltending to defense to offense. He specifically talked about players not getting to the middle because they’d get hit (except one shift by Keegan Bal), and that the players didn’t give up but don’t have 100% buy-in yet. It’s great to see a coach that honest, transparent, and passionate, especially when he says “Let’s be clear. I’m standing up in the middle of it. I’m on top of it. I have to be better. And I will be better.” Malawsky is the reigning Les Bartley award winner and that interview showed why.

Buffalo @ Toronto

I had so much to say about this awesome game, I wrote a whole game report on it.

Panther City and Callum Crawford

I only really watched the first quarter or so of the PCLC @ LV game. The rest of it was spent looking up player, team, and league scoring records because (a) various people asked me for such information on Twitter, and (b) that’s just what I do. The earliest sock-trick in a game. The most points in a half. Callum Crawford’s career records for goals and points in a game. Most combined points by two players on the same team in a game. Even the biggest comeback in NLL history, just in case.

I did listen to the game while checking all of these things. Of course you likely know by now that Panther City demolished the Desert Dogs 21-12 (fist bump to Rush fans – the band, not the team). Crawford scored eight goals and added seven assists, and his fifteen points was second in NLL history to Mark Steenhuis’s seventeen on Feb 14, 2009 (a day Rock fans remember as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, as the Bandits beat the Rock 25-10). Only slightly less incredible was Will Malcom, who scored four but added ten assists for fourteen points. At one point early in the third quarter, Panther City had a 15-goal lead, which is tied for the fifth highest lead in any game since 2005.

Panther City’s scoring was awesome. Nick Damude kept the Desert Dogs to three goals in the first half, which is awesome. Even the fact that Las Vegas didn’t give up and scored nine in the second half was pretty awesome. But there was a not awesome aspect to this game, other than the Desert Dogs defense and goaltending. See below for the rest of the story.

One awesome for each of the other games

The other three games this past weekend, Rochester @ Halifax, San Diego @ Philly, and Georgia @ New York, were all on at the same time as the Buffalo @ Toronto game I attended, and then I was busy all day Sunday so I wasn’t able to watch any of them. Quickly:

• It’s awesome that New York is finding its groove and is now on a two-game winning streak – and beating some pretty good teams while doing it.
• Similar to Callum Crawford, it’s awesome that Ryan Benesch is still able to play at such a high level (five goals on Saturday) at the ripe old age of 39. Those guys, as well as Matt Vinc, are John Tavares’ing the hell out of this season.
• It’s awesome that Philly was down by five in the fourth quarter but managed to (a) keep San Diego from scoring for the last ten minutes, and (b) score four of their own in that time. They didn’t quite complete the comeback but the end of that game was likely pretty exciting to watch.

Not Awesome

No single-game scoring record for Crawford

The goals just kept coming for PCLC, until a few minutes into the third when they just… stopped. Eighteen goals in the first 33 minutes, three in the last 27 minutes. Coincidentally (or not), Panther City scoring stopped when Callum Crawford was inexplicably benched for the remainder of the game after scoring his eighth goal. Jake Elliott mentioned numerous times on the broadcast that this was very odd, and confirmed with their sideline reporter that Crawford wasn’t injured at all, just not playing. Crawford was two goals away from tying the single-game record of 10 and two points away from the single-game record of 17, and he had 27 minutes to do it. Maybe the logic was that these records were distracting from the team goal of winning the game, so they took that distraction away. But let’s be honest here: at that point, the score was 18-3. Winning the game wasn’t in doubt. So why wouldn’t you want those records to belong to someone on your team? It’s another thing you might be able to use to pull fans in, and let’s face it, Panther City needs that.

Maybe Crawford took himself out of the game, and maybe it was a coaching decision, though I don’t know why either of those things would happen. I guess he is 39 and one of the older guys in the league, so maybe he just wanted a break since his contributions weren’t really needed; it’s safe to say he’d already done his part in that game.

We had the chance to see history made on Saturday, and we didn’t. But the fact that it didn’t happen isn’t the problem. The fact that it was explicitly prevented from happening is the Not Awesome here.